This one is sure to be fun! Katharin is always a great presenter and has great jokes!

Help! I’m an Accidental Government Information Librarian presents … Introduction to Research Data Management for Librarians

The Government Resources Section of the North Carolina Library Association welcomes you to a series of webinars designed to help us increase our familiarity with government information. All are welcome because government information wants to be free.

What is it? Why should you care? What can librarians do about it? Webinar will present an overview of Research Data Management including: data management planning, how data fits into the research lifecycle and scholarly communication, and key resources/strategies for liaison librarians working with faculty and other researchers.

Katharin Peter is the Social Sciences Data Librarian for the Von KleinSmid Center Library for International and Public Affairs at the University of Southern California. She has a BA in Sociology, a Master’s in Library & Information Science, and a Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Science & Technology.

Help! I’m an Accidental Government Information Librarian presents … International Government Survey Data: How to Find and Use It
The Government Resources Section of the North Carolina Library Association welcomes you to a series of webinars designed to help us increase our familiarity with government information. All are welcome because government information wants to be free.

What is the difference between international government statistics, aggregate data, and microdata? What is “unit-level” data? How does one discover, evaluate, and utilize microdata produced by international organizations, foreign governments, and nongovernmental organizations? This webinar will introduce the user to tips and tricks for finding, evaluating and using international microdata, and explaining how these sources differ from the statistics and aggregate data many users are more accustomed to working with. Major discovery services will be explored, as well as the essential skills needed to interpret data documentation, study descriptions, and the formats in which these data are provided.

Jim Church is the librarian for economics, international & foreign government information, global poverty, and political economy at the University of California Berkeley. He serves as the Chair of the IFLA Government Information and Official Publications Section and is also active in the ALA Government Documents Round Table where he writes the international documents column for the journal DttP. His primary areas of interest are in economic development and international and nongovernmental organizations.

We will meet together for Session #64, online on November 14 from 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. (Eastern). Please RSVP for the session using this link: http://tinyurl.com/grs-session64

We will use WebEx for the live session. Information on testing and accessing the session will be made available when you register.

Summer projects are a great thing. This summer a big focus of my time will be converting our webinar series to accessible, embeddable YouTube videos. The series is called “Help! I’m an Accidental Government Information Librarian” and is organized by the North Carolina Library Association’s Government Resources Section. The series has been ongoing since April 2011 and we have 48 webinars available on a variety of topics, from government data to genealogy to congressional history. The series was geared originally to librarians who were asked to take on government information duties without training, but anyone is welcome to attend and there are lots of topics of wider interest.

The webinars take place live in UNCG’s Blackboard Collaborate software, which has worked great, but the recordings are not very accessible. They require Java and are not easily embeddable in LibGuides, etc. This is a major problem for a lot of our clientele like public librarians and even the public to be honest. So, rather than hiding this excellent resource we decided to figure out a solution.

Enter out Help! YouTube channel. This is definitely a work in progress, so if you have suggestions, please get in touch. We have been asked to archive them through Internet Archive as well. For each webinar I am downloading as MPEG-4 and then cleaning up the recording. To do this I needed a solid video tutorial software. I have an older version of Camtasia at work that has a mind of its own (and doesn’t work). So rather than offering up my first born for a new version (I kinda like my cats), I decided to apply for an award that would pay for it. Luckily, I won the NewsBank/Readex/GODORT/ALA Catharine J. Reynolds Research Award from the ALA Government Documents Round Table. It will help pay for Camtasia on my personal computers, a copy that I can give to NCLA in case there are other sections that would like to use it, and some will be leftover for travel to promote the series at conferences.

I will be adding webinars throughout the summer. The cleaning process can take a while so I am asking people to give me suggestions for priority webinars. If you have a favorite from our list, let me know. My goal is for this to be a FREE and accessible resource for all information specialists/librarians/reference gurus out there. Because after all, government information should be free!